Distributed ledger technology (DLT) has the potential to address industrial challenges, build trust, and unlock new value across businesses and industries via the use of smart contracts. Initially, DLT was mainly used for financial applications, such as Bitcoin as the first and most prominent application of DLT. However, today, DLT is more and more used for applications outside the financial context.
Examples include use cases in trade or in the manufacturing industry. To showcase the benefits of DLT for the manufacturing industry, the KOSMoS research project, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMF), builds a DLT-based infrastructure for the two industrial use cases, dynamic leasing and transparent maintenance:
- Dynamic leasing: Today, the leasing of machines in the manufacturing industry is often based on a static monthly leasing fee. Linking the leasing fee to both the degree of utilization of the machine and the degree of maintenance of the system will enable an automated and dynamic calculation of the leasing fee — a use case that is implemented in the KOSMoS project. This leads to a more efficient and fair calculation of the leasing fee of a machine. The documentation of leasing-relevant data to determine the respective fee is automated with the help of smart contracts.
- Transparent maintenance: Typically, the maintenance of industrial machines is carried out without digital support. By using a digital maintenance log as done in KOSMoS, principles of predictive maintenance could be leveraged to ensure a more effective maintenance process. A blockchain is used in this context to transparently and securely document the maintenance and error messages of the machine. The blockchain-enabled tamper resistance can guarantee that the entries in the maintenance log have not been modified. Hence, this use case aims to establish a blockchain-based maintenance log that verifies maintenance logs from the blockchain while allowing data sovereignty to remain with the customer.
In particular, the research project seeks to develop a DLT-based collaborative platform for small and medium-sized companies (SMEs) in the manufacturing industry. We summarized the KOSMoS approach, our key goals and our concrete technological implementations, alongside our primary “lessons learned”, in the “KOSMoS Blockchain Toolkit” — an > 60 pages English practically-oriented documentation — to disseminate our research results to the general public and showcase how the benefits of DLT can be leveraged for industrial use cases.
The KOSMoS Blockchain Toolkit has various goals. First, the toolkit discusses the benefits of using DLT in the manufacturing industry and shows how DLT can improve business processes and increase process efficiency.
We also discuss which DLT systems could be chosen to implement such use cases. Despite the enormous potential of DLT, the use of DLT in the German and European industries is not widespread to date. This is also due to the fact that the benefits of using DLT are not well recognized within the industry.
This document seeks to educate in this regard and to explicitly outline the benefits of DLT for the German industry.
Second, it is explained in detail how a DLT infrastructure can be set up for industrial use cases. For the KOSMoS project, we decided to use Hyperledger Fabric as the underlying DLT. This toolkit assists on how such a Hyperledger DLT platform can be set up in the context of the manufacturing industry, aiming to lower the threshold of market entry for DLT-interested companies.
Therefore, the toolkit includes step-by-step guidance on how to use a DLT for our two use cases dynamic leasing and transparent maintenance.
Access the KOSMoS Blockchain Toolkit with its more than 60 pages of practically-oriented English documentation here.
Remarks
This document has been written within the scope of the KOSMoS research project funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) under the funding code 02P17D020. The Frankfurt School Blockchain Center (FSBC) and Datarella are part of the KOSMoS research projects. More information about the KOSMoS projects can be found on the website. If you like this article, we would be happy if you forward it to your colleagues or share it on social networks.
Martin Schäffner is a Blockchain Architect at Datarella GmbH, a Munich-based blockchain solution provider that is also a participant in the KOSMoS project. His fields of interest are designing, managing and creating enterprise blockchain solutions. Martin did his Master’s at the Technical University of Munich in information systems and wrote his Master’s Thesis about analyzing and evaluating the Self-Sovereign Identity ecosystem. You can contact him via mail (martin.schaeffner@datarella.com) or via LinkedIn.
Constantin Lichti is a project manager and research associate at the Frankfurt School Blockchain Center, and doctoral candidate (PhD) at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. His research area is the individual adoption of blockchain technology. You can contact him via LinkedIn and email.
Jonas Gross is a project manager and research assistant at the Frankfurt School Blockchain Center (FSBC) and also works for the KOSMoS research project. His fields of interests are primarily cryptocurrencies and central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). You can contact him via mail, LinkedIn and via Twitter.
Prof. Dr. Philipp Sandner is head of the Frankfurt School Blockchain Center (FSBC) at the Frankfurt School of Finance & Management. In 2018, he was ranked as one of the “Top 30” economists by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), a major newspaper in Germany. Further, he belongs to the “Top 40 under 40” — a ranking by the German business magazine Capital. The expertise of Prof. Sandner, in particular, includes blockchain technology, crypto assets, distributed ledger technology (DLT), Euro-on-Ledger, initial coin offerings (ICOs), security tokens (STOs), digital transformation and entrepreneurship. You can contact him via mail via Website, LinkedIn or follow him on Twitter.
